Friday, September 22, 2006

I heard about Notepad++ from Michael Carter, who showcased SQLAlchemy at our last SoCal Piggies meeting and used Notepad++ to edit his Python files. I downloaded it this week and all I can say is that it rocks! For Windows users, it's one of the best editors I've ever seen, and of course it's completely free. Notepad++ is based on the Scintilla editor, and it does syntax coloring for a gazillion languages (Python included of course), it includes a huge number of plugins, such as a Hex Editor, etc., etc. Highly recommended!

Monday, September 18, 2006

This is a question that's been asked twice already on the Pybots mailing list, or in emails addressed directly to me. Every time I answered that I don't really know any, and I advised the people asking the question to go through the list of their favorite Python projects, and pick some that they'd like to test. Or go through the list of major Web frameworks and pick some.

Anyway -- maybe a better way is to ask all the readers of this blog: do you have a project that you'd like to test in the Pybots buildbot farm, but maybe you don't have the hardware to run the buildslave on? Then let me know, or even better, let the Pybots mailing list know. There are people such as Jeff McNiel and Skip Montanaro who have hardware and resources, and are looking for projects to test.

BTW, the Pybots farm now has 6 buildslaves (the 6th was courtesy of Elliot Murphy, who contributed an AMD-64 Ubuntu Dapper box running the MySQLdb tests), with 3 or 4 buildslaves on the way.

Thanks a lot to all the people who have contributed or will contribute soon. It's very rewarding to see the Python community responding in an enthusiastic manner to a call to do better testing of Python projects.

If you've been reading Titus's advogato blog, you'll be interested in knowing that he has a new blog: "Daily Life in an Ivory Basement". Will Guaraldi will be happy to know the blog is based on pyblosxom.

As a cool side note, Sanghyeon rewrote the home page for pybots.org in reST; the page is kept in subversion and the server hosting pybots.org is doing a svn update every hour, followed by a rest2html call

As I said in a previous post, the Pybots setup already proved its usefulness by uncovering issues with new keywords such as 'with' and 'as'. Some of the projects affected by these new keywords are zope.interface, roundup and zanshin. According to the Zope developers, the issue had been fixed a while ago in the svn repository, but no release has happened since. The roundup developers already fixed the issue -- nice to see this.

Also, the Trac unit tests, when running against the latest Python trunk, are failing with an ugly backtrace. If somebody can shed some light, please do.

Friday, September 08, 2006

As of Sept. 6th (revision 51767), Python 2.6 has two new keywords: with and as. Python code that uses either one of these words as a variable name will be in trouble. How do I know that? Because the Twisted unit tests have been failing in the Twisted Pybots buildslave ever since. Actually the issue is not with Twisted code, but with zope.interface, which is one of the Twisted pre-requisites. Here's the offending code:

Traceback (most recent call last):File "/tmp/Twisted/bin/trial", line 23, in from twisted.scripts.trial import runFile "/tmp/Twisted/twisted/scripts/trial.py", line 10, in from twisted.application import appFile "/tmp/Twisted/twisted/application/app.py", line 10, in from twisted.application import serviceFile "/tmp/Twisted/twisted/application/service.py", line 20, in from twisted.python import componentsFile "/tmp/Twisted/twisted/python/components.py", line 37, in from zope.interface.adapter import AdapterRegistryFile "/tmp/python-buildbot/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/zope/interface/adapter.py", line 201for with, objects in v.iteritems(): ^SyntaxError: invalid syntax

It would be great if the Zope folks fixed their code so that the Twisted tests will start passing again. This issue actually impacts all packages that depend on zope.interface -- for example zanshin, which also fails in the Pybots buildslave for the OSAF libraries (graciously set up by Bear from OSAF).

I mentioned the 'with' keyword already causing problems. As it turns out, Seo Sanghyeon's buildslave, which is running tests for docutils and roundup, uncovered an issue in roundup, related to the 'as' keyword:

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

I'm happy to report that the Pybots project got its first user other than yours truly. Seo Sanghyeon set up a buildslave running on Debian Unstable which is running the docutils unit tests every time a checkin is made into Python trunk or in the 2.5-maint branch.

Marc-Andre Lemburg also offered to run a buildslave for the egenix-mx-base tests, while Manuzhai offered to run a buildslave for the Trac tests. Skip Montanaro also expressed interest in running a buildslave, but he hasn't decided on a project yet.

You can see the current pybots buildslaves here. Expect to see more active buildslaves in the next few days.

Marc-Andre suggested I write a Pybots FAQ and put some info on the Python wiki, so here they are: